Eye drop medicines are very expensive and there has been great waste of such medicines because persons have aimed them badly whereby they miss the eye.
Unfortunately, many people who require eye drop medicine of the expensive types are themselves elderly persons who can least afford to waste expensive medicine.
Many of the elderly have considerable difficulty in controlling their hands with the steadiness required to aim an eye drop dispenser accurately because of loss of coordination due to old age and also palsey.
There has been placed on the market a protrusion extending from an eye drop dispenser in parallelism with the nozzle thereof, the protrusion having an outer end adapted to rest on the upper portion of the nose and being rigidly fixed to the dispenser, and being formed of thermoplastic material of one piece with the dispenser for guiding the positioning of the nozzle so as to dispense fluid at a position to one side of the nose engaging terminal end of the protrusion which is the proper spacing for causing the nozzle to be aimed at the user's eye.
However, the protrusion mentioned has been serving only a single brand of eye drops to the applicant's knowledge, that brand being one that has a very special dispenser with a fluid holding chamber elongated transversely of the direction of fluid ejection so as to provide a place on the rearward end thereof for supporting the protrusion.
The result has been a very highly specialized product serving only a minute portion of the eye medicine dispensing field. The only portion being served has been that portion which uses one single brand of eye drops contained in one single type of special container, the eye drops being a brand that is dispensed without prescription.
However, the vast majority of eye drop conainers are used without any means for their positioning and resulting in the waste of medicine mentioned. Among this vast majority of eye drop containers are the prescription medicine containers which are usually provided with a forward portion which is substantially cylindrical in the usual and common way which bottles have always been made. For these prescription medicines there has been no way heretofore conceived of facilitating their positioning during dispensing.
Also there has been no way conceived heretofore of positioning dispensers of the many dozens if not hundreds of brands of eye medicines which are sold without perscription, the vast majority of which are likewise sold in containers having substantially cylindrical forward portions sometimes called lower portions.
One of the problems in conceiving of a positioner suitable to be attached by a user to a standard eye drop medicine bottle is the problem of how to attach the positioner to the bottle in some way without interfering with the necessary squeezing of the bottle for dispensing the fluid. That is a problem which does not arise in the case of the one-piece protrusion and dispenser bottle bacause the attachment portions and the squeezable flexible dispenser bottle are one and the same.
I have solved this problem with my concept of using flexible pressure sensitive adhesive for securing the body of the positioner to the medicine bottle, the pressure sensitive adhesive being a tape which is itself flexible and, therefore, does not interfere with the squeezing of the bottle for dispensing.
A problem, however, arises in the weakness of the attachment of such a tape to the body of a positioner and which is solved by my concept of having the positioner have an unusually large area at a portion near the tape, the area not being so large as to interfere with the squeezing of the bottle, however, because of the necessary relative lesser flexibility of the large attachment portion and the tape itself.
Another problem resides in the proper positioning of the positioner on the bottle. This I have solved by designing the positioner to be used with the advice that the positioner nose engaging terminal end is to be rested on a flat surface at a time when the terminal end of the nozzel of the bottle is rested on the same flat surface, whereby the nose engageable portion and the nozzle terminal end will be positioned directly to the side of each other, even though the type of bottle involved might be twice as long as a smaller bottle on which the same positioner of this invention must also be able to function.
Still another problem is bottle shape. Many bottles are not cylindrical and, therefore, present side surfaces which are almost flat and end surfaces that are rounded, but which are so narrow and sharply rounded as to present a much different surface to which to attach than is the case with a cylindrical bottle. It is, therefore, an object of this invention to provide my concept of a positioner having a tape attachment portion which is able to adapt itself to bottles of any shape.
I discovered that tapes available are not strong enough. I have conceived that by placing a flexible plastic layer on the outside of the tape and substantially co-extensive with the tape, with the plastic layer of greater strength than the tape and disposed between the tape and the body of the dispenser, that a construction of sufficient strength is provided.